Brawner: Dardanelle High Beats The State

Steve Brawner with our content partner, the Arkansas News Bureau, takes a deeper look at the academic success rate of the Dardanelle School District.

By all accounts, it should be a struggling school district with its low-income and immigrant populations, but that’s not the case.

Writes Brawner:

In a superintendent’s office built sometime in the 1930s, school administrators are explaining how Dardanelle High beats — in biology, almost doubles — the state average on high school end-of-course exams.

It’s doing it despite the fact that 72 percent of its students qualify for free and reduced lunch prices and 38 percent are English language learners. Many of the students’ parents are immigrants who work at a Tyson plant, the town’s only major employer.

Here’s what Dardanelle students did last year. In algebra, 97 percent scored proficient or advanced, compared to a state average of 77 percent. Ninety-eight percent scored proficient or advanced in geometry, compared to 72 percent statewide. In literacy, Dardanelle is outscoring the state 83-70 percent. And it’s not even close in biology, where the district’s 80 percent proficient and advanced rate ranks third in Arkansas and nearly doubles the state’s 44 percent.

Dardanelle’s composite ACT average of 22 last year beat not only the state average of 20.2, but also the national average of 20.9.

What is the “silver bullet” that has led to Dardanelle’s success? Read Brawner’s full take here.